Snuggles The Symbiote

Mommy was brushing my hair. It'd been a few days since we got back from the Savage Lands, and she'd called in her 'favor' with 'mayor' Fisk to get the paperwork for her to be legally alive and her property rights recognized expedited. It was all over the phone, and I only heard part of it, but she used the phrase "upside your head" which makes me think she had to threaten him.

I decided I was never gonna ask for follow-up on what went down in those cage fights.

Also, Doctor Strange looked at me with the Eye of Agamotto the other day, Mister Snuggles has properly copied the spells he put on Scream so I don't need her anymore.

"Good riddance," Mister Snuggles whispered in my ear.

"Be nice," I chastised.

"Be nice about what?" Mommy asked

"I was talking to Mister Snuggles," I explained.

"I am never going to get used to that," Mommy muttered and then went back to brushing.

Anyway, now we had to confront Crazy Aunt Yuki about getting Mommy's rightful property back. After seeing her proof that Mommy was Mommy and alive again, she agreed to a neutral meeting. Today, we were going to meet up with She-Hulk, who was still handling legal stuff for me for a bit, and then meet at a neutral location to hash things out. I didn't really want to go, and honestly felt like it was a bad idea, but the logic is that if we need it I am technically a Krakoan citizen and have diplomatic status that we can maliciously abuse if things go bad.

...Should I feel bad about abusing the precedent that was set by years and years of nobody calling Doctor Doom's bluff when he abuses his diplomatic status?

Anyway, while we were doing that the people from Earth Bet were talking with Dr. Richards about how to properly approach the "hostile master" situation back there and also Taylor was getting used to being Scream's permanent host...

Except for Grace. Grace was... I don't know, she's been making herself scarce ever since Mommy came back. Probably because Mommy asked awkward questions about my 'pet serial killer.'

Anyway, we were just getting ready to head out and do the awkward meeting where I was almost certainly going to have a bunch of slurs by kookie Aunt Karen. I didn't really need Mommy to brush my hair for me, but... It was nice.

"All done," Mommy said as she finished.

I hopped up and Mister Snuggles shifted into my best approximation of professional formalwear.

"Ahh," Mommy said. "My little girl looks so cute in a suit." I gave her a big smile in response.

A little later, once Mommy was ready, we said goodbye to everyone and left. Mommy made sure to bring a bag containing her bat. Doctor Strange had brought that too since I lost it in the teleport. He said he'd tried to use it for a tracking spell but that didn't work, and that he'd taken the liberty of reinforcing it so it wouldn't break if used by someone with superstrength.

One thing I'd noticed comparing New York to Brockton Bay, now that I actually had a frame of reference for my home city, was that traffic was significantly worse. Traveling on foot was actually faster than hailing a cab. Especially when you had superpowers and could just parkour across rooftops.

...Rudimentary experimentation with webswinging was that it was not as easy as it looked, even with the appropriate memories. And telling Mommy that I could live through being liquified so I'd be fine if I crashed into something had not been as reassuring as I'd hoped. So parkour, not webswinging.

It took maybe half an hour to get to She-Hulk's office. Or, well, to the office building. We ended up meeting her outside. "Hello, Ms. Walters," I greeted.

"And hello to you, Ashley," she greeted back. "You seem to be doing much better than the last time I saw you."

"Yeah... Sorry about your desk."

"It's alright, I buy them in bulk for exactly that reason," the Sensational She-Hulk observed. "Now then... Your Aunt has, surprisingly, agreed to sign things over to you and your mother without a fight, and... Doesn't even seem to have a lawyer. So we're going to meet her at a diner owned by a friend of mine, sit down, she'll sign things, your mom will sign things, and hopefully that will be the end of it."

"And if not?"

"You have diplomatic immunity," she continued, "and your mother tells me she got away with threatening Mayor Fisk the other day. I shouldn't be telling you this, but if the legal route doesn't work you have options."

"Also," Mommy added, "our lawyer can bench a literal mountain."

"That I can," She-Hulk agreed, "just don't ask me to demonstrate right now."

We then proceeded to walk to the diner where we'd be meeting crazy Aunt Yuki. It was an old-school place and seemed pretty nice. I committed the place to memory, might be nice to come back here.

Of course, Auntie Karen was already there. Nervous worms wriggled in my tummy—

"No worms here," Mister Snuggles deadpanned. I rolled my eyes. The point was, I was nervous about this meeting.

"Yuri," crazy Aunt Yuki greeted coldly as we sat at a booth. We made sure I was on the outside so I could leave if we needed to.

"Yuki," Mommy greeted back. "You seem to be taking this well."

"The police contacted me the evening after this one assaulted me," she said with a gesture to me, "and the report confirmed that you'd been dug out from the inside." I muttered about how she'd started it before she continued, "So it wasn't a question of whether you were back. It was a question of whether you were still you. Now where's the paperwork?"

She-Hulk handed her a folder and a pen... Ten minutes of awkward silence, while crazy Aunt Yuki read through and signed paperwork. Then she was done, she pushed everything over to Mommy who likewise signed some things and then handed it all back to She-Hulk.

"And as soon as this is filed," the tall green lawyer said, "it should take about a week for everything to be all official."

"You're really going to do this?" Yuki asked. "You're going to take that thing into our parents' house?"

"I have a name," I grumbled.

"I need to live somewhere," Mommy replied. "I can't keep mooching off of Dr. Richards forever, and my daughter, your niece, deserves a home... You haven't been living there, have you?"

"For your information, no," Yuki replied. "I had an apartment in Brooklyn."

"Wait... You've just got a big house that nobody's been living in?" I asked suddenly.

"I wouldn't expect a genejoke to understand the foibles of human emotion," Racist Aunt Yuki said through gritted teeth, "but some people would prefer not to just callously sell off their chilldhood homes."

"Also, it's really hard to sell a house with blood stains in the basement," Mommy added deadpan. "Especially when all the neighbors know that it's the house where the Mom went crazy and made her kids fight with real weapons."

"She didn't make us do anything," Yuki insisted. "Those lessons were our heritage and you enjoyed them as much as I did."

"At first," Mommy admitted, "but she was hurting us, Yuki."

Yuki scoffed, and She-Hulk gave me a side glance. "It's complicated," I whispered.

Something seemed to pop into Mommy's head. "Wait... You said you had an apartment. Yuki, what's going on?"

"Like you care."

"Of course I care!" Mommy insisted. "You're my sister. What's wrong."

Yuki looked like she was about to say something, then suddenly went into a massive coughing fit. The kind where in a cartoon, organs would come flying out of her mouth. And I noticed a strange, familiar, kind of sweet scent.

"I'm dying, Yuri," Yuki replied, defeated. "I've been sick for a while, I got the news it was terminal a few days before your grave was busted open. I've been able to keep it under wraps for a while, but I'm getting weaker every day and I can't beat this cough. I have maybe six months to live. My lease is up soon, I'll be moving into a hospice next month," she finished.

"Yuki, I..." Mommy didn't seem to know what to say.

"Save it," Yuki replied. "Maybe if you'd been there for me, maybe if you hadn't put gene trash before family, then..."

Okay, I was done listening to this. I recognized the chemical that had wafted into the air during her coughing fit, I knew what kind of farce this was.

I got up, walked to her side of the booth, and grabbed the hem of her shirt. She didn't even have the time to react before I exposed her torso up to her lower ribs.

"Nasty rash, boils and blisters... And a sweet-smelling chemical on your breath," I observed. "That's M-Pox. You're a mutant. Just like me."

"No, I'm not!" She denied with a certain mania.

I rolled my eyes and extended a tendril of Mister Snuggles's biomass out to touch and engulf the blistery rash and then phase into her through her pores and spread out through her insides. Power inherited from Agony lets us absorb and neutralize the terrigen that caused this reaction, while power inherited from a couple of anti-venom codices fixed the physiological and genetic damage and purged that opportunistic respiratory infection that was giving her trouble.

I pulled the mass back, revealing flawless skin. "M-Pox cured, you're gonna live," I quipped.

Crazy Aunt Yuki gave me the most wide-eyed look. "...Why?"

"Because, Aunty Ruckus," I deadpanned, "just because you don't value my life, that doesn't mean I don't value yours." She just glared at me. "Look, you're clearly very messed up and in need of therapy. Get it or don't, I don't care. I just didn't want you to die."

Then I sat back down and things got really awkwardly quiet for a bit before Yuki asked "are we done? I have a lease to renew and a hospice placement to cancel."

"Yeah, you're done," She-Hulk replied while double-checking the paperwork.

Yuki left and shortly afterward so did Mommy and I, She-Hulk leaving with the paperwork at the same time.

"That was a very kind and mature thing you did, sweetie," Mommy said. I beamed. "But we're having a talk about appropriate ways to go about that kind of thing later."

That was fair I guess. All in all, that went a lot more smoothly than I'd feared.

We eventually got back to Yancy Street and immediately the mood soured. Everyone seemed kind of somber.

I walked up to Taylor, "What's going on?"

"The situation back home has... Escalated," she answered. "Let's just say that instead of a plan of negotiation, we're considering a plan of attack."